GAN-Knowledge Distillation for One-Stage Object Detection

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have a significant improvement in the accuracy of object detection. As networks become deeper, the precision of detection becomes obviously improved, and more floating-point calculations are also needed. Because of the great amount of calculation, it is inconvenient for mobile and embedded vision applications. Many researchers apply the knowledge distillation method to improve the precision of object detection by transferring knowledge from a deeper and larger teachers network to a small student one. Most methods of knowledge distillation are needed to design complex cost functions and mainly aim at the two-stage object detection algorithm. Therefore, we propose a clean and effective knowledge distillation method called Generative Adversarial Networks - Knowledge Distillation(GAN-KD) for the one-stage object detection. The feature maps generated by teacher network and student network are employed as true and fake samples respectively, and generating adversarial training for both of them to improve the performance of the student network in one-stage object detection. The experimental result shows that our approach achieves the performance gain of 5% mAP when compared with MobilenetV1 on COCO dataset.